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Egyptian security guards intervene and detain scores of Morsi supporters who gathered in Alexandria on November 4, 2013 to denounce Morsi's trial in Egypt. AA/ABACA/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.The 2013 Egyptian coup, which overthrew the democratically
elected Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi, strengthened the
anti-political Islam camp while hardening its attitudes.

Besides advocating the complete exclusion and repression of
Islamist groups, this camp also lumps jihadists and peaceful political parties
together.

The rigidity and anti-democratic hypocrisy of such attitudes recalls
anti-communist sentiment in the US during the Cold War, when many ordinary
Americans and their government could not grasp that the repression practiced by
right-wing US-allied regimes was just as ruthless as that applied in the Soviet
Union and by its allies.

the US government readily looked the other way as human rights were violated

The thinking was that an autocratic right-wing government
was far better than the communist alternative. With this worldview as a
foundation, the US government readily looked the other way as human rights were
violated.

The current coalition against nonviolent political Islam,
sadly, includes some of the youthful protestors at the vanguard of the
2010-2011 Arab Spring who now harbor uncompromising attitudes toward the Muslim
Brotherhood and other Islamist groups.

In the worst cases, their ‘allergy’ to political Islam is so
severe that it clouds their ability to empathize with the human rights of
fellow citizens.

After the 2013 coup in Egypt, many of those who called for
Mubarak’s removal in 2011 not only remained silent, but actively cheered, the
violent crackdown on Muslim Brotherhood supporters.

An uncompromising attitude toward political Islam is first
and foremost the consequence of many decades of state-driven propaganda which
has convinced a critical mass of Arab citizens and foreigners that political
Islam constitutes an existential threat to the state and needs to be put down,
at any cost to democracy and human rights.

Historically, Arab autocrats at times co-opted political
Islam for their own purposes, but mostly they repressed Islamist movements in
the most brutal ways, as we are learning
from the work of the Tunisian Truth and Dignity Commission.

What Sisi and the Egyptian military really fear is not Islamists but democracy itself.

Islamist political parties may play the democratic game, the
autocrats said, but once in power they will trample on personal freedoms and
capture state institutions.

The autocrats also convinced American and
European leaders that their regimes were the only bulwark against extremism.

Today, the regime that rules Egypt, the most populous Arab
country, has returned to these well-trodden tactics. Its leader, Abdel Fattah
El Sisi, plays up the threat of Islamism as a way to bolster his internal and
external support and justify repression.

What Sisi and the Egyptian military really fear is not
Islamists but democracy itself. Nevertheless, many Egyptians have bought into
the narrative that strongman rule is the only bulwark against chaos and Islamic
theocracy.

In anti-Islamist discourse, the Muslim Brotherhood is
indistinguishable from violent jihadist groups. Never mind that Islamists have
peacefully participated in parliamentary politics in countries such as Kuwait,
Morocco and Jordan for many years now, and in Tunisia since 2011.

The anti-Islamist
propaganda narrative in Egypt leaves this fact out, and instead the Sisi regime
has declared the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group. Sisi has also reinstated the Emergency Law, which in modern
Egyptian history has been used to silence opposition while doing little to
quell terrorist attacks.

In Tunisia, anti-Islamist sentiments have been exploited for
political purposes and to distract citizens and outsiders from anti-democratic
practices.

Tunisian president Beji Caid Essebsi, who spent most of his
career serving dictators, recently pushed to end a ban on Tunisian women
marrying non-Muslim men and called for changes to gender-discriminatory gender
laws. Yet, he has done little to reform Tunisia’s interior ministry and police,
well known as sources of repression, and has presided over a troubling rollback
of democratic principles.

This uncompromising anti-Islamist line has powerful external
sponsors. The United Arab Emirates uses its financial and diplomatic clout (at
times in alliance with other Gulf Arab allies) in a relentless campaign against
the Muslim Brotherhood.

The wave of nationalism and populism sweeping across western societies has bought into the anti-Islamist narrative

The Emiratis have supported anti-Islamist figures like
Eastern Libya’s self-styled strongman Khalifa Hiftar, whose militias commit
well-documented human rights abuses in the name of fighting Islamists. Saudi Arabia has also intervened in support of politically
“quietist” Libyan Salafists.

The wave of nationalism and populism sweeping across western
societies (which features Islamophobia as one of its main tenets) has also
bought into the anti-Islamist narrative with the help of Russian information
warfare.

This has helped convince many Europeans that in the Arab
world, autocracy is the only defense against radical Islam. As a consequence,
European right-wing populist parties and their followers express support for
Bashar al-Assad, who is fighting a noble battle against jihadists. Never mind
that he is also backed by the theocratic Iran and scores of
religiously-motivated Shia militias. All of this lowers the potential for
Europe, never a champion of Arab democracy, to be a positive force for reform
in the Arab world.

Similarly, the administration of Donald J. Trump has
signaled often and vocally its unqualified support for Arab authoritarian
leaders as partners in the fight against “violent Islamic extremism.”

In April 2017, a photograph of Egyptian president Sisi, by
most measures more repressive than former president Hosni Mubarak, sitting next
to Trump in the White House spoke volumes about the priorities of the
administration and its readiness to buy into the time-tested appeals of Arab
autocrats to American presidents. Meanwhile, Trump's son-in-law and advisor
Jared Kushner have forged close friendships with Saudi and Emirati royalty.

The post-Arab Spring campaign against political Islam has
been used again and again to justify political exclusion and human rights
abuses.

Its rigid ideological approach only further entrenches
authoritarianism and promotes feelings of marginalization, which can drive extremism.

Egyptians, Libyans, Tunisians, and other Arabs deserve
better than to be told that they must choose between extremism and chaos on one
hand or autocracy on the other.

It is also time that courageous western leaders
openly challenge the premises and methods of the campaign against nonviolent
political Islam, not because they agree with the program of nonviolent Islamist
parties, but rather because they care about democracy.

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